July 2019 of The Atlantic

Jerks, stats, the Moon, baseball, and truth vs. fiction

1.     “Mailer on the Moon” is about Norman Mailer and Of a Fire on the Moon and the book is labelled as being essential to understand Apollo 11’s journey.  Highly doubtful. Also it is marked as being essential for understanding its legacy. Certainly not. Personally, it is reported, Mailer was in anticlimax. His effort was for the self. Lots of needed money was offered to write about Apollo 11. A gig. His ego less prominent but stamped on the account he wrote as a lesser advertisement for himself, not as others did for the provision of style but for a huge staging of personality, the dominant theme. Not events, history, but himself as more important than all else. Numbing importance and being bloated and tasteless – so the 60’s editors and readers expected and “enjoyed.” He was paid well for his act – Believe It or Not.

Odor is reputed to be a feature little desired by the WASPs of the NASA technocracy. But the most publicly known members of various missions filled crew cabins repeatedly with odorous offal.  Deodorant might have helped to prevent Of an Odor on the Moon. Norman linked odor and Time and Death. Undeniably NASA’s leaders intended to conquer the Moon, odor or not, and so reduce it by removing it from the unknown,  that had our possibilities assigned to it, so it would become less and smaller. The WASPS triumphant. But given the time and place, the who and the what could not be otherwise. Fiction lacked acceptance but Norman needed a fictional self he wrote of as everywhere and everytime such that there could not be an alternative. He was It. No margin, no protection from banality, and Truth took a holiday. The Moon had offered an unlimited adventure. This fire on the moon ruined that. The lunar events were taken by him for an effect on himself and his interaction with others.

Nevertheless, Norman was granted  status as a brilliant writer in tune with what was underneath a surface of the obvious achievement of the actions of Apollo 11’s supporters and participants but only by spewing that conception of himself over what was underneath. A hopeless attempt to cover up the encounter of reality, the one that was to come to be, with what might have been. If it, the landing on the Moon, was to happen, there was only one way it could happen and all those other ways, however entrancing, enthralling, exciting, enlightening, exhilarating, enchanting , ebullient, ecstatic, elated, electrifying, eximious, euphoric, enriching, eclectic, effluent, embellished, extramundane, enthusiastic, exalting, eudemonic, enhancing, elevating, empyreal, enabling, or emphatic they could be, they were gone.

Mailer had a sense of this as we all could. Therefore, he was not unique in his realization but rather in who he was, his personal elitist cult of me, myself, and I uber all made him a jerk. And there would be more and more like him. Why read what a jerk has written? He wanted to be read. They accommodated him.

2.     Or if not read, then to be watched as a baseball spectator who cannot know what makes one player better than another. Those better players are an elite, as was Mailer and some are jerks or so it is reported in “Building the Next Babe Ruth” wherein one can see what they do physically for the assigned physical tasks of baseball, but not how they mentally do it. Only they can realize how it is being accomplished while they catch, hit, slide, throw, and run. That’s baseball. And that’s not baseball. Baseball has long been statistically-ridden and managers have changed the course of a game based on “stats.” But, of late, stats aren’t characterizing what they will do but what they have done. So then a player’s worth, value is brought under analysis. Some do well after the numbers come out, and they become arrogant, or it intensifies whatever latent arrogance they had. So then they are jerks. Certainly arrogance is one distinguishing characteristic of a jerk, and Mailer qualifies. So why watch a jerk?

If you could statistically train a Mailer such as in a writers workshop, what with stats on sentence length, use of vocabulary, position of adjective and adverbs and frequency of their use, plus topics and meaning – and you get a Mailer? Could he always be a statistical outlier? His value, worth lies in his elitism and his cult of the One? Then can you produce more than one baseball star? Yes, you can, they are named in the article. They have differing names but having the same outcome of a superiority in performance of tasks that are part of baseball. This superiority is derived from stats. If more players could be statistically altered, their value, worth would increase less. If more were like Mailer, and could be produced to be like Mailer, his and their value, worth lessens.

3.     With jerks as writers and jerks as baseball players, can we feel comfortable in that we are in neither category? If “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning” is not accepted by us, it is implied we are all jerks. We have willingly, statistically speaking, since there are so many of us, become enslaved to versions of truth. We have sought to escape from boredom by accepting fictions instead of truths since the truth isn’t diverse and diverting enough. But twist it and turn it and you get many differences that are more entertaining. Mailer couldn’t do it straight, there had to be fiction for entertainment. You can’t play ball as if you had a calculator strapped to your head or so the fiction of it has been proclaimed. Baseball remains less entertaining without stats. Winston of 1984 is quoted – “Sanity is not statistical.” Oh but it is if our stat analysis of literature, stat analysis of baseball and the stats that are synonymous with social media can be accepted as extensions of the feverish desire for entertainment.

To be consistently entertained by arrogant jerks or other elitists requires that statistically fiction predominates over truth. Once fiction most often prevails, it is true.